My first reaction to what James said was that even the idea of “surrendering” eventually gets surrendered. It’s not something you do so much as it’s something that happens when you stop holding on. Even the ‘you’ dissolves. And yeah, that can absolutely feel like a loss at first.

When I first started meditating, based on what I thought meditation was supposed to be, the silence that met me felt almost indifferent and so painful. Than as my constructs, my stories, and what I believed myself to be started falling away, it honestly felt like I was disappearing too.

But over time I noticed something important: when the constructs fell away… I didn’t. There was still a presence in that “nothingness.” A kind of spacious, quiet awareness… the same stillness AUM rises from and returns to. And in that space, “I” wasn’t abandoned. “I” was held.

From that sense of being held, compassion began to arise on its own. And I realized that the “nothingness” we’re so afraid of isn’t a loss or a void in the frightening sense. It’s the openness that holds everything. It’s what allows everything to appear and dissolve.

That, to me, is the Love James is pointing to, not an emotional love, but the underlying presence that’s always here when everything else drops away.